simplistic question: why do people assume all marchers are illegal

[bobbieinok]

immigrants?

I thought many native Hispanics (or whatever the correct word is) as well as many others were marching.

Is the meme that all marchers were/are illegals an attempt to scare everyone about a 'foreign menace threatening USA'??????

So people opposed to even legal immigration will be really frightened and ready to back whatever anti action a private or govt group might take???????

[etherealtruth]

1. Is that what people think?

I am not being at all sarcastic ... I didn't realize that.

[skids]

2. Simplistic answer: they don't.

I think a lot of the fuel feeding this flamewar is the assumption of what other people are thinking, rather than listening to what they are saying.

FWIW.

[Bridget Burke]

3. You've got it: Fear!

Some of the marchers are legal. And others are Born In the USA. In Houston, we had African-Americans & others join in.

The image of a brown tide coming to overwhelm Anglo-Saxon America works well to encourage fear. Per the latest talking points, let's make that a brown Catholic tide.

Booga Booga!

[Fleshdancer]

4. I was wondering the same thing

It never occurred to me to think that all the marchers were illegal immigrants. :shrug: I spoke to someone recently who made that assumption and I was surprised by it.

[Kajsa]

5. The media doesn't help.

They have hyped these marches emphasizing
the number of undocumented workers in the crowd.
Little/no air time is given to the number of
documented workers who participate.

It's part of the news spin- if they keep shouting it,
everyone will believe it.

[NYC]

7. So did they explain why the INS didn't swoop in,

and arrest them all?

There were born citizens marching, too. I just think that if the media reports a preponderance of illegal immigrants, they should explain why the INS doesn't take advantage of the opportunity to arrest them all.

[Deep13]

6. I never assumed that even though I disagree with amnesty.

I figured a fraction of them were illegal and the rest were either lawfully present foreigners who, of course, have the same rights to protest as anyone else and sympathetic naturalized and native-born citizens. As a side note, many Mexican-Americans are descended from people who suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of the border after the USA annexed California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

Since the corporations want illegal labor here, I think it is a sensationalist bias rather than a conservative one on the part of the media.